Shane Meadows is an emerging filmmaker on the global stage. He has a much-ballyhooed film at this year's Tribeca Film Festival (SOMERS TOWN) that I tried to get tickets to, but found that it was quickly sold out. After seeing one of his earlier films – ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE MIDLANDS – last Saturday on Reel 13, I'm almost relieved.
Meadows has a familiar and talented cast to work with here - faces you've seen and admired including Robert Carlyle (TRAINSPOTTING), Rhys Ifans (NOTTING HILL) and Shirley Henderson (HARRY POTTER AND THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS). However, even they can't help the film overcome its rather tired and recycled plot – small-time gangster on the lam returns home to woo back his old flame who has become involved with a third party. It's the kind of love triangle that Howard Hawks did to perfection in HIS GIRL FRIDAY, but ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE MIDLANDS never even approaches that level of cleverness or intelligence. Instead, it has the feel of an absurd Mike Leigh film – the same lower class British subjects and vernacular, but with a comic, slapstick-type sensibility that feels more like a bad American sitcom.
The accents were often hard to decipher, which has always been a problem for Carlyle, but even for the other actors, the pseudo-cockney slang of the Midlands (a somewhat suburban, albeit lower class area literally in the middle of England) made many scenes difficult to follow. There seemed to be a lot of inside jokes and references that were Greek to me and that I assume would only be amusing to a Brit or those more familiar with the Midlands area. Overall, I think the "Britishness" of the film left myself and, I suspect, many other New York viewers feeling detached and indifferent toward a tone and sense of humor that is foreign to us. Generally speaking, when one watches a film, one wants to get wrapped up in its story and its characters. One wants to be emotionally involved, but unfortunately, ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE MIDLANDS left me feeling cold.